19 June 2010

Bitchy Boys Club worried about their investments

Roger Harrabin, the BBC's front man for protecting the massive investments the corporation's pension fund has made in 'green' technology stocks, has a typically dishonest opinion piece in the latest New Scientist, calling for the 'denialists' to calm down. His reasons, with the words omitted in bad faith added in parentheses:

Climate scepticism is on the rise, boosted in large part by the hacked emails [that revealed the systematic falsification of date and professional dishonesty] originating from the "climategate" scientists at the University of East Anglia in the UK, and by the [equally systematic and deliberately misleading] carelessness of fact checkers for[authors of] the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The damage to the public standing of climate science has been substantial. In the UK in February, a BBC poll of 1001 people found that just 26 per cent believed human-made climate change was an established scientific fact, down from 41 per cent only three months earlier.

Umm - could it be that scepticism is on the rise in reaction to years of over-the-top shrieking about how rock-solid the science was by people with a political agenda? Yup - Harrabin admits it:

This political reaction against scientific "facts" is hardly surprising, as from the libertarian perspective [the way the findings of some] climate science [has been oversold] points towards a global socialism where individual choices are constrained.

Not to mention creating another vast edifice of corrupt, circle-jerking international bureaucrats. Anyone who opposes such a consummation to be devoutly wished, says Harrabin, is clearly in the pay of Satan. Thus a conference of catastrophic global warming sceptics in Chicago, 'was arranged by the Heartland Institute, a think tank which has taken money from oil and tobacco firms over the years'.

That's called ad hominem, and is merely one of the Aristotelian logical fallacies regularly employed by the catastrophists. Anyway, through the tax it levies, the BBC has also taken rather a lot of money from oil and tobacco (and banks, and arms dealers) over the years - why have they not refused to take such tainted funds?

It's impossible [only to a one-world socialist] to take the politics out of a topic as complex, uncertain and far-reaching as climate change. But maybe there is a way to improve matters. The majority of the sceptic scientists appear now to acknowledge that the world has warmed [no half-way informed person has ever denied it] and that humans may be partly to blame [funny, I thought it was all down to resource-raping capitalism]. Most agree with the scientific consensus that basic physics means CO2 will warm the planet by about 1°C above pre-industrial levels.

Harrabin will have to hand in his catastrophist badge and vuvuzela: the warmist baseline has been 2°C for many years.

Where they disagree is over computer models supported by the [now thoroughly discredited] IPCC, almost all of which project that the world's natural feedback mechanisms will amplify the CO2 warming, probably to a dangerous degree. If the debate can focus on this feedback warming, we might be able to remove some of the political heat. But don't hold your breath [or carbon emissions, as we are now supposed to call it].

The issue is not, and has never been whether warming is taking place. It has always been whether trillions of dollars should be taken out of productive use to fund a vast new bureaucracy to counter a hypothetical threat that - according to the catastrophists' own calculations - can only be averted by massive de-industrialisation.

In simple terms, the warmists have so over-sold the alleged threat posed by CO2 that any reasonable person must conclude that - should such catastrophic predictions prove to be more than hot carbon emissions - the money will have to be spent on amelioration.

But that would not advance the cause of one-world socialism, and is thus unthinkable heresy.